When using MH/nmh at the command line, this flag is
desired about 95% of the time. So it makes sense for it
to be on by default.
Wow. I include text in replies about 15% of the time. Most of my
responses are terse; I rarely have time to go through and edit the
returned messages.
I also find that users whose UAs default to including the subject
message in replies, tend not to edit those replies...thus dumping
trash in the mailboxes of those people they reply to. OTOH, if they
ask for the text in replies, they're more likely to be willing to edit
out the parts that are irrelevant.
So to me, this is a user preference thing. It can always be set in
.mh_defaults.
And -noformat seems like the right default behavior, because it does
the least harm.
Keith
p.s. does -format work appropriately with MIME messages these days?
presumably, it should decode the MIME content-transfer-encodings (what
if the text isn't in the recipient's preferred charset?), throw away
the non-text/plain parts (or convert them to #-style mhn references?),
wrap long text lines to 70-some-odd characters (to get around
Microsoft one-CRLF-per-paragraph brain-damage), all before inserting
"> ". And mhn or send or post or whatever it is should be able to
automatically add charset and content-transfer-encodings and header
encoding when needed for non-ascii text...I shouldn't have to invoke
mhn for this.
(replies seem to be the most difficult facet of MIME support.)